Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Broadcom NIC Teaming on Windows 2008 R2 Core

Since we became a Microsoft Partner we are slowly migrating all of our non- Microsoft software to the Microsoft equivalent. This month it was time say: Goodbye VMWare, Hello Hyper-V !

Ofcourse this causes some slight problems too :-) I VMWare it is extremely easy to setup a NLB / Failover NIC team. Just by clicking arround.

Microsoft however decided to leave the NIC teaming up to the NIC manufacturers... Word is that intel has a very good tool that works under R2 Core also.

Today I found out that the software Broadcom provides by default doesn't install on 2008 R2 Core.
Here is how it's done:

- First go to the Broadcom Website and download the last version of BACS. Unzip it and store it somewhere on the hard drive of your core installation.

- Startup the console on the Core installation and navigate to the folder with the BACS files.
- Open the subfolder named "Driver_Management_Apps_Installer"
- On the command prompt type setup /s /v/qn   (the space missing between the v and /qn is no typo!)
- Now the drivers and the software will be installed on your system.
- To open the interface navigate to C:\Program Files\Broadcom\Bacs and run Bacs.exe. The GUI will pop-up and you can setup a NLB team for the NIC's on your system.

Happy configuring !!

PS. This doesn't work on Windows 2008 Non R2 because it lacks some .Net 2.0 Framework Files...

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